Test Driving Employees

“Employee trials work best for people in support, design and developer positions, said Matt Mullenweg, founder and chief executive of Automattic, the creator of WordPress, the blog and website tool. Still, every hire, without exception, goes through a two- to six-week contract period, and is paid the standard rate of $25 an hour.”

Employee trials are daunting, and downright impossible for many people. For some companies they’re completely unrealistic.

But the fact that Automattic had trials is one of the things that convinced me I wanted to work with them. I wanted to work alongside people who believed so much in what the company was doing that they’d go through the pain of a trial period.

The trial period was certainly painful for me. At the time I was working 60-80 hours a week at a job I wasn’t fully committed to, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d fit a trial period into that. But somehow I did it, and I’m glad I did because now I get to work with people totally invested in a shared goal.